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THE GREATEST FIGHT EVER?

They still call it the most sensational fight ever for the world heavyweight championship, between champion Jack Dempsey and his hammer-fisted Argentine challenger, Luis Angel Firpo. In September 1923, 85,000 packed into New York’s Polo Grounds to see all three minutes fifty-seven seconds of it. Nobody asked for their money back.

Dempsey and the Wild Bull enables any fight fan to to soak up the Roaring 20s atmosphere, to experience the electric tension of a ringside seat and a wealth of anecdotal treasures…

Damon Runyon told his readers of ‘Jack Dempsey, the young mountain lion in human form, from the Sangre del Christo hills of Colorado.’

Sports Editor Davis J. Walsh called Luis Angel Firpo, ‘a human grizzly capable of all the savagery of his primitive forebears.’ This was no tea party!

Dempsey loved Hollywood, starring in a thriller serial Daredevil Jack and he loved mingling with such stars as Chaplin, Fairbanks and Valentino. ‘I was young, eligible, a champion… People wanted to introduce me to their daughters, their sisters, but not to their wives.’

Firpo the shaggy Argentine giant had a legendary huge appetite – and a head for figures. Negotiating a purse of $125 for his frst US fight, he also asked for the film rights. He paid $175 to have the fight recorded on film which he sold to a distribution company in Buenos Aires for $25,000 – plus 40% of the gross.

In November, 1921, champion Dempsey was sued in the New York supreme court for $250,000 damages by Albert Siegel on the allegation that he had alienated the affections of his wife Mrs Bee Palmer Siegel, a shimmy dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway...

‘Capone was the kind of guy you either liked or hated,’ said Dempsey. ‘He was a rough customer who wanted to be accepted as a man, not a racketeer.’

Click here for more information, or to read a free sample from Dempsey and the Wild Bull: The Four Minute Fight of the Century.